A Thinking Street Photography Site
I’m still walking around…
The streets are exhibitions waiting to speak.
What would the stall say?
What’s he thinking about?
We’re all concealed by what we buy and sell.
We all buy and sell.
We’re all waiting.
Until it’s all meat…
Camera: Olympus XA2
Film: Ilford XP2 400
Some days, it seems like things just won’t come together.
You’re feeling blocked.
The framing is off.
You look up.
You look back at people.
You look up again.
You try again.
What else can one do, but try to fail better.
And then you get the feeling that things are coming together finally.
And you find something that makes sense, finally.
Camera: Leica M6
Lens: Voigtlander Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4 SC
Film: Ilford XP2 400
Inspiration – that sudden realization.
Some find it in trees.
Others find it in rocks.
Many find it in the interaction between the built and natural environment.
There’s a biblical angle to inspiration, akin to revelation.
What is the street asking of me these days?
What is my street?
Is it an impersonal grid?
Is there a personality emerging?
Where is the street these days?
These are all reflections of our selves.
Camera: Leica M6
Lens: Voigtlander Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4 SC
Film: Kodak BW400CN
These are poses we adopt.
We pause.
We think.
Should I?
I want! I want!
Do I need this?
We have an expertise.
We need a poultice.
I need this.
I want this.
Yum.
Buying, after all, is an art we’re good at.
Camera: Leica M6
Lens: Voigtlander Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4 SC
Film: Kodak BW400CN
The geometry keeps changing.
Hong Kong is a good place to be a flaneur.
Take a step and the view changes itself.
Lots to absorb.
You could stand at the same spot.
The landscape will change very quickly.
It’s easy to enjoy the view.
You seek out order to square the circles.
Hong Kong will come to you.
And so will the rest of the world.
Camera: Leica M6
Lens: Voigtlander Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4 SC
Film: Ilford XP2 400
I’m fascinated by what you could see when coming down the Mid-Levels Escalator at Central in Hong Kong.
You could see lots of small businesses, restaurants and shops.
You could also see unruly leaves and branches against grey concrete buildings.
They’re part of human activity.
Things happen, though they don’t always announce themselves.
Life is understated sometimes.
At other times, it is in your face.
This is how concrete lives.
How we live with concrete.
The unruly beauty of nature and concrete.
We can’t help but look again and again.
Camera: Leica M6
Lens: Voigtlander Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4 SC
Film: Ilford XP2 400
So, my ten-year-old son is into Geocaching.
It’s basically a game where you hunt for hidden caches – you could then sign your name in the booklet in those canisters/boxes hidden or buried in various places in Hong Kong and the rest of the world.
We’ve found magnetic canisters stuck behind signposts, or hidden under piled-up logs full of ants and spiders.
You could then announce your success to the whole world and leave a few clues via the Geocache app.
So you see, it’s killing two birds with one stone.
I get to do a spot of street photography, and my son gets to do a bit of geocaching.
That’s what I call father-son bonding.
It doesn’t matter where I go as long as I’m on the streets.
We could meander and come back to the same place – it doesn’t matter.
Some people fish, others are into street photography, and of course, some are into geocaching.
And we’ll have a late lunch after a morning of running back and forth.
I suppose it’s another day in Hong Kong.
We do what we can to preserve our sanity…
Camera: Leica M6
Lens: Voigtlander Nokton Classic 35mm 1.4 SC
Film: Kodak BW400CN
Photography is … visual. That much is obvious. As a published poet and literature professor, I’m supposed to be able to convey ideas with words but what happens when something is a visual idea?
This would take us from visual to verbal to visual again. And the first and last visual may not be the same, even though we’re talking about the same photograph.
I look and look and understand how a photograph works, but I’ve yet to properly learn how to say why it works and why I enjoy it.
Photography has made me rethink some of those things to do with literature that I’ve forgotten. Of course, the experience of a literary work is not the same thing as a book review or a scholarly paper.
The experience … the experience … the horror … the horror … the “oomph” … it starts with the experience, and sometimes I feel like all one has to do is to read and look and be quiet. That was the experience of reading in my youth which put me on the path of academia.
The subjective “oomph” comes first. All the bits about literary/intellectual history, the meaning of meaning and so on, comes after.
This explains why my colleagues down the corridor could spend so much time on books that I genuinely find boring and pointless … and of course, vice versa.
Anyway, back to what is visual “oomph”, at least for me:
That’s the Leisure and Cultural Services Headquarters at Shatin. Perhaps this is what the Ministry of Truth looks like in Orwell’s 1984.
The mini-bus and high-rise apartment buildings. So very Hong Kong. This is at the elevated bus interchange just outside New Town Plaza, the hard-to-miss shopping mecca at Shatin.
Walk down the sloped pavement by the side onto ground level and you’ll see an entire length of village houses, some of which have been converted into eateries.
That’s just below the bus interchange, right next to more mini-bus terminal stops. I like the different greys of the pavement…
Yet another village house … with a gothic feel.
All these images are taken from within 200-300 metres. That’s how packed Hong Kong is. Keep in mind this is the urbanised area of the New Territories, third in line in terms of urban development, coming after the Kowloon/Tsim Sha Tsui areas and the Central/Wanchai areas on Hong Kong Island.
Thanks for reading.
Hong Kong Lucida 